lf rig idly
light and, as he hoped, like Oldershaw, "owns a huge ready-made clothes
store on Broadway--appalling things with comic belts and weird pockets."

"Oh!" said Joan. Always, for ever, the scent of honeysuckle would bring
that picture back. Martin--Martin.

"He makes any amount of money by dressing that portion of young America
which sells motors and vacuum cleaners and gramaphone records and hangs
about stage doors smoking cheap cigarettes."

"Yes?" Joan listened but heard nothing except that high clear voice
coming through the screen door.

"He built this cottage as an antidote and spent his week-ends here
entirely alone with the trees and crickets, trying to write poetry. He
was very pleased with it and believed that this atmosphere was going to
make him immortal."

"I see,"--but all she saw was a porch covered with honeysuckle, a
hammock with an open book face downwards in it and the long shadow of
Harry Oldershaw flung across the white steps.

Gilbert went on--pathetically unable to catch the unaffected young
stuff of the nice boy and his kind. He had never been young.

"He had had no time during his hard struggle to read the masters, and
when, without malice, I quoted a chunk of Grey's 'Elegy' to him, the
poor devil's jaw fell, he withdrew his blank refusal to sell the place
to me, pocketed my cheque, packed his grip, and slouched off then and
there, looking as if a charge of dynamite had blown his chest away. His
garments, I notice, are as comic as ever, and I suppose he is now
living in a turretted house with stucco walls and stone lions at New
Rochelle, wedded to Commerce and a buxom girl who talks too much and
rag-times through her days."

Joan joined in his laugh. She was there to make up for her unkindness.
She would do her best under the circumstances. She hoped he would tell
lots of long stories to cover her wordlessness.

Gilbert emptied his glass and filled it again. He was half conscious of
dramatizing the episode as it unrolled itself and thrilled to think
that this might be the last time that he would eat and drink in the
only life that he knew. Death, upon which he had looked hitherto with
horror, didn't scare him if he went into it hand in hand with Joan.
With Alice trying, in her persistently gentle way, to cure him, life
was unthinkable. Life with Joan--there was that to achieve. Let the law
unravel the knots while he and she wandered in France and Italy, she
triumphantly young,